by Michael King
Te Puea found such statements breathtaking in their impertinence and ignorance. Would Pakeha audiences have been addressed in this manner? she asked. This was the Crown which had frequently breached the Treaty of Waitangi and, according to a 1927 royal commission, confiscated an excessive amount of land from Tainui for simply trying to protect its borders and its Kingitanga. And here were its representatives, one of them a viceroy, saying that, if individual Maori did not behave as Pakeha believed they should, then they would be further deprived of the already meagre resources which governments of the day chose to share with Maori.
All the myths about interaction between the two peoples were about to be fully tested for the first time. Most Maori tribes retained traditional recollections of one or even two migrations: that which brought their people from an ancestral homeland in the Pacific, and that which took them from an earlier place of settlement to the one in which the hapu was currently living based on its meeting houses, urupa and wahi tapu. From the time of World War II, however, most Maori families underwent a third migration, which took its members from small, largely rural communities into the towns and cities of the nation, where the living conventions were defined by Pakeha.
That new shift brought both compensations and trauma: eventual security and wider educational and employment opportunities for some, and cultural and emotional dislocation for others. Some families, removed from the social and cultural structures that had given their lives meaning and direction for generations, and lacking any alternative structures to substitute or compensate for these changes, collapsed into dysfunction, alcohol and drug abuse, physical and emotional health problems, violence and crime.
The relocation began in earnest during World War II, when manpower regulations and the Maori War Effort Organisation opened up a diversity of labouring and manufacturing jobs not generally available previously to Maori men and women. In addition, the recreational options of city life created in some country areas what anthropologist Joan Metge called a ‘fantasy contagion’. In 1936 only 11.2 per cent of the national Maori population had lived in urban areas. By 1945 this had risen to 25.7 per cent, and by 1996 to over 81 per cent. Maori had become, in little more than a generation, an overwhelmingly urban people.
The impact can best be visualised by consideration of the effect on individual cities. There were 1766 Maori in Auckland in 1935, for example. By 1945 there were 4903, and by 1951, 7621. In the same period the Wellington Maori population jumped from 341 to 1570. At the same time suburbs that had previously seen few Maori became predominantly Maori (and later Pacific Island) in their ethnic composition: Otara in South Auckland, Frankton in Hamilton, Porirua East in Wellington. Even South Island cities such as Christchurch and Invercargill began to acquire substantial Maori populations as North Island Maori moved there for employment, particularly in freezing works.
There was no single cause for the momentum which this migration built up over three decades. In periods of national prosperity, like the early 1950s, the ready availability of well-paid but unskilled jobs was one attraction. It led to Maori men in particular taking manual jobs in large numbers in provincial towns and cities, in labouring, construction and meat works, for example – the kinds of jobs that would leave them vulnerable to unemployment in times of national economic downturn. Nor was the migration caused simply by the positive appeal of such work. There was also a negative factor in the economic decline of Maori rural communities, brought about because Maori land alone was unable to provide for what was by this time a burgeoning Maori population.
This is not to suggest that Maori farming as a whole was a failure – far from it. Some incorporations, such as Mangatu on the East Coast, and some individual farmers did spectacularly well. Nor was Pakeha farming by contrast an unqualified success. But the overall situation of Maori farming, particularly on the small dairy units developed under Apirana Ngata’s scheme, was uneconomic by the 1950s. This provided an added incentive for farm workers and their families to move to towns and cities, and this depopulation made rural communities even less viable and urban migration still more appealing. It was a combination of rural population displacement, urbanisation, and a relative lack of educational, trade and professional qualifications among Maori workers that created a brown proletariat in New Zealand cities – a situation that some commentators viewed as a potentially dangerous ingredient in urban race relations. Professor J. G. A. Pocock, for example, wrote in 1965:
[We] may be going to have ghettoes – the current term for urban areas where a distinctly pigmented minority have to live with bad houses, bad schools and unrewarding jobs – and, when faced with such ghettoes, the Pakeha may find that he is more prejudiced than he likes to believe … whakama may cease to be the mere feeling of shyness and inadequacy which it is now, and become instead a truly bitter sense of rejection; ideologies of alienation and ambivalence may arise, and the voice of some Maori (or Islander) James Baldwin may some day be heard.
This is an anticipation, by a quarter of a century, of the inflammable social ingredients described in Alan Duff’s seminal novel Once Were Warriors.
As Pocock recognised, the social and cultural consequences of the relocation of the Maori population were considerable. Migrants newly arrived from rural areas were faced with a set of Pakeha suburban mores not evident in Maori communities. There were difficulties with managing salaried incomes for the first time, with budgeting, savings and investments, and with accommodation, hire purchase and door-to-door salesmen. There were instances of overt discrimination in employment, accommodation and hotel bars that arose from Maori and Pakeha having to interact widely for the first time. Such instances generated publicity only when they involved well-known professional figures, such as Kingseat Hospital Superintendent Henry Bennett, who was refused a drink in a hotel private bar in Pukekohe because he was Maori.
Urbanisation also created the need to redefine aspects of Maoriness: the nature of the extended family in the urban context; how to hold hui in the city; whether to take tupapuku (corpses) ‘home’ to rural marae or to conduct tangihanga in a city living room or garage; how, and whether, to keep live links with rural tribal bases; the tribal status of people who were one or two generations removed from live iwi associations. There was also the need, for the first time outside conditions of war, for people from differing tribal backgrounds to devise ways of co-operating with one another to solve specifically Maori issues. Differences of kawa had to be resolved, traditional suspicions and antagonisms discarded or submerged.
Tangata whenua people already swallowed up by urban expansion – Ngati Whatua at Orakei, for example, Tainui at Mangere or Ngati Toa in Porirua – were unwilling to let people from other tribal backgrounds make use of existing marae. This, coupled with the absence of marae in new suburbs, led to the conception and development of urban marae. In addressing these problems, Maori discovered that detribalisation could lead to multi-tribalism, and an intensification of a sense of Maoriness grew out of such urban marae projects as Te Unga Waka at Epsom, led by Whina Cooper, Hoani Waititi in West Auckland, led by Pita Sharples, and Maraeroa in Porirua East, led by Ned Nathan. Some peoples, such as Tuhoe in Panmure, also built urban marae that were specifically tribal.
Urbanisation accentuated aspects of Maori insecurity in relation to non-Maori. In 1951, 57 per cent of the Maori population was 20 years old or younger (as against 34.8 per cent of Pakeha), which indicated a greater proportion of young dependants and non-wage-earners. At the same time the Maori birth rate was considerably higher than that of non-Maori: 43.6 per 1000 in 1955 as against 26. Most significant, almost all the Maori workforce was in unskilled and lower-income employment, especially in agriculture and related industries (33 per cent in 1951) and manufacturing (23 per cent). Only 3.6 per cent of Maori workers at that time earned £700 or more, compared with 18.6 per cent of non-Maori. And in 1956 only 6.56 per cent of the Maori workforce held professional, managerial and clerical positions, as against 26.69 per cent of n
on-Maori.
All these factors combined to make Maori more vulnerable as a group than Pakeha when wool prices fell a decade later and ended full employment. They created a cycle of circumstances that was self-reinforcing and difficult to break: lower standards of educational attainment led to lower-income jobs or unemployment, which led to lower standards of housing and health, which led to higher rates of crime, which led back to lower educational attainment, and so on. Attempts to define these factors and their magnitude, and to devise new policies to deal with them, were not made until well into the 1960s. By that time some dysfunctional Maori families were two generations into the poverty trap, living on welfare in substandard accommodation, their children playing truant from school, a prey to alcohol and other forms of substance abuse and possibly sexual abuse, habituated to violence and criminal activities, without any sense of identity or belonging or of empathy with other people – and, as a consequence, contributing disproportionately to all negative Maori statistics.
This was also the period when many families living in cities ceased to have active links with their iwi and hapu, and lost all live connection with the Maori language, the practice of Maori ritual and the observance of tikanga Maori. The language was in a relatively healthy state in the early 1930s. By the 1970s it was in serious danger of extinction as elderly native speakers died and were not replaced by younger ones. The policy of not speaking Maori in schools, requested by Maori parents and school boards in the 1860s, had done some damage to the transmission of the culture, but not nearly as much as that caused by the later breakdown of family and tribal links in the post-war years. In addition, there was a tendency for those of grandparent age to view the future of the language – and of Maori culture itself – with pessimism. A commonly heard saying of the time was, ‘You’ll have better prospects if you korero Pakeha.’
Those who grew up from their earliest years in a cultural vacuum, in which they felt ill-equipped to be Maori, yet knew by the way people treated them that they were not Pakeha, were also those who were most vulnerable to non-achievement and crime if they were associated with other risk factors. From the earliest days of European colonisation, it was this period, and these experiences, that held most risk for the survival of Maori culture. And this phenomenon was not even recognised officially, let alone seriously addressed, until the 1970s.
Changing social and economic conditions in Maori life led to continued experimentation with different styles of leadership. The rangatira or hereditary basis for hapu and iwi leadership survived, especially in such tribes as Tainui and Ngati Tuwharetoa, but it was largely a rural phenomenon. An increasing number of urban-based leaders, such as Pita Sharples of Ngati Kahungunu and Ranginui Walker of Whakatohea, accumulated authority based on achievement. Graham Latimer of Te Aupouri became a national figure as a result of his lengthy chairmanship of the New Zealand Maori Council. And some, such as Whina Cooper, made the transition from tribal to multi-tribal mana.
Born Josephine Te Wake at Te Karaka on the Hokianga Harbour in 1895, Whina was the daughter of a leading Te Rarawa chief, Heremia Te Wake. From him, she inherited mana, considerable ability and an expectation that she would assume a leadership role among the Kai Tutae and Ngati Manawa hapu of Te Rarawa. After education at Whakarapa Native School and St Joseph’s Maori Girls’ College in Napier (where Sir James Carroll paid her fees), Whina was in succession a teacher, a storekeeper and a farmer in the northern Hokianga. She took her father’s place after he died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. By the late 1920s, based at Panguru, she was known as the most forceful community leader in the district. When Apirana Ngata was seeking local tribal support for his land development scheme, Whina was an obvious ally, and she introduced and supervised the scheme in her area. She extended both her expertise and her influence as a result of a second marriage in 1935 to William Cooper, a Ngati Kahungunu friend of Ngata who had represented Maori on the royal commission investigating Maori land in 1927.
After Cooper’s death in 1949, Whina observed the large number of Maori abandoning rural districts for the cities and decided to move to Auckland to become involved in voluntary welfare work. She patrolled hotels, looking especially for Maori parents who were not coping with alcohol or who were neglecting their families. In 1951 she was elected first president of the Maori Women’s Welfare League, which was set up that year by the Department of Maori Affairs on the initiative of Rangi Royal, a senior welfare officer. Whina held the position for six years. After establishing local branches throughout the country, and making a considerable impact with the education of Maori mothers in such matters as child-rearing and household budgeting, Cooper turned the league into the only national Maori forum then in existence, and into the major non-political pressure group for representations to governments on Maori issues (both these roles would later be subsumed by the New Zealand Maori Council, set up by the Holyoake National Government in 1962). She was also especially active in securing adequate Maori housing in Auckland, in building urban marae and in fundraising for voluntary welfare programmes, especially those organised by the Catholic Church.
In 1975 Whina Cooper established Te Roopu o te Matakite and led the Maori Land March from Te Hapua in the far north to Parliament in Wellington, dramatising a national Maori determination not to lose further land to Pakeha or Crown ownership. She remained a prominent Maori protest figure in the 1980s and 1990s, still adopting new causes and formulating representations to ministers of Maori Affairs as she approached 100 years of age. She had long since departed from traditional patterns of Maori leadership in that her influence in later years sprang from her reputation as an urban and national Maori figure – as Te Whaea o te Motu or Mother of the Nation – rather than from her localised or tribal position. She died in 1994 aged 98.
Another training-ground for non-tribal Maori leadership was the Public Service. After World War II a large number of former Maori Battalion officers moved into Maori-related posts in government departments. Many of them completed university diplomas or degrees with rehabilitation assistance. To some extent, these men provided an extension of the Young Maori Party model in that they accepted the need for Western education and administrative skills so as to function influentially within the system of government. Unlike their predecessors, however, they had seen the Maori language and culture survive into the second half of the twentieth century and they were impatient with anything less than full equality with Pakeha citizens. One of their number, Rangi Logan, voiced their feelings in the 1946 general election campaign: ‘We more than did our share at El Alamein and elsewhere … [We] shed our blood in two world wars.’ If these acts had done nothing else, he declared, they had at least purchased the right to equality of opportunity.
These men generally accepted the raison d’être for the Department of Maori Affairs and the hierarchical structure by which it functioned. They accepted the concepts behind the land development schemes, incorporations and post-war welfare services. They also accepted that, to make a significant impact on the Pakeha-dominated systems of party politics and the Public Service, they had to lobby as Maori presenting Maori causes. To be seen as Waikato stating Waikato views or Ngapuhi representing Ngapuhi would have been to exercise relatively little influence over government policy and legislation. In this they were assisted by their Maori Battalion service, which helped them to view Maori as a people rather than as a group of competing tribal units, and by the detribalisation that accelerated after World War II as more and more families left their traditional rohe and intermarried in the cities with Maori from other regions.
These same Maori bureaucrats would be challenged a generation later, in the 1960s and 1970s, by a group of largely urban-based Maori dissidents, most of whom had backgrounds in tertiary education. They included Ranginui Walker and Patu Hohepa of the Auckland District Maori Council, Robert Mahuta of the Tainui kahui ariki, Koro Dewes and Sydney Mead of Victoria University, Tipene O’Regan of Ngai Tahu, and leaders of protest groups such as Nga Ta
matoa and Te Ahi Kaa, Syd and Hana Jackson, Atareta Poananga and others. All these people spoke out for Maori interests more emphatically and more abrasively than their predecessors, and they would question whether the Public Service and local authority structures, with Pakeha reserving for themselves key decision-making positions, were the most appropriate ones to deal with the needs and aspirations of an indigenous Pacific people.
A major source of discontent among almost all Maori leaders after World War II was that successive governments were slow to perceive the changing conditions and needs generated by Maori urbanisation, and to respond to representations by Maori to address those needs. Labour made some concessions by passing the Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act in 1945, which allowed for the establishment of local tribal committees and the first Maori welfare officers appointed to work with urban Maori. Labour also dropped the expression ‘Native’ from all official usage in 1947 and substituted ‘Maori’.
When National came to power under Sid Holland in 1949 they did so without any Maori MPs and without any previous interest or conspicuous expertise in Maori affairs. On the advice of officials, however, they did allow the setting-up of the voluntary Maori Women’s Welfare League, and in 1962 they accepted a recommendation of the Hunn Report and passed the Maori Welfare Act, which set up the New Zealand Maori Council, a pan-tribal organisation above the tribal committees established by Labour. The feature of the legislation that most appealed to National was that the Maori Council would provide a form of largely National-supporting Maori leadership that would counter the Maori MPs, all of whom had been Labour since 1943. As expected, the first three chairmen of the council, Sir Turi Carroll (nephew of Sir James), Pei Te Hurinui Jones and Graham Latimer, were all National Party supporters. What National did not expect, however, was that, despite the conservative leadership, the council would campaign strongly for the recognition and implementation of the Treaty of Waitangi.